A thoughtful, provocative collection of well-tested teaching strategies and philosophies that work across the curriculum.
An inspiring exhortation to make the standard college syllabus work harder and better.
Germano and Nicholls, who teach at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, argue that the syllabus, “that almost invisible bureaucratic document,” must become something more than the purposes it normally serves: as something of a contract between teacher and student (if you do X and Y, you will get an A) and as a repository of university policies on such things as unexcused absences, plagiarism, and accommodation for special needs that the teacher almost certainly did not write. Both those functions are necessary, but the syllabus can be more useful. The authors encourage teachers to keep a “secret syllabus” that is a teaching diary, reflecting on successes and failures in presenting material and eliciting students’ responses. Moreover, the authors hit hard and repeatedly on the thought that the best teaching turns on notions of “student-centered pedagogy,” which relies on collaborative projects. “So when we craft a syllabus,” they write, “let’s choose to think actively about the plan we’re making for students to know together and how to know together.” Over the course of this short book, the subject subtly transforms from the Rousseauvian pedagogical contract to the act of teaching itself, with some useful pointers toward unwonted practices, such as the teacher’s holding discourse back and insisting that the students talk, as well as promoting the thought that if the course contains readings, students must be actively committed to that work. “Because we sometimes fail to fully imagine our students in that act of reading,” write the authors, “our syllabi sometimes fail to create the right conditions for students to read well.” Overburdened teachers will cheer the authors’ suggestion that they mark only categorical errors on written work—but perhaps will groan at the thought of reading “a fully corrected redraft.”
A thoughtful, provocative collection of well-tested teaching strategies and philosophies that work across the curriculum.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-19220-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
